From noted CF trainer, writer, and consultant Charlie Arehart, CFMXPLUS has been devoted to issues and ideas of value to ColdFusion and BlueDragon developers. You can find him posting new content at carehart.org/blog/

Friday, January 10, 2003

A lot of folks may have heard about the available updater for Dreamweaver MX .

But did you know there is an updater for HomeSite+ (from the base 5.1 to a new 5.2 version)? If you' don't know what HomeSite+ is, see Yes there is, and it solves many things including one of the biggest beefs that many have had: you can again customize the toolbars and resource windows! There are still more interesting new features, as listed in the release notes with a long list of what's been fixed (see my favorite, listed as a fix to bug 28406). The updater itself is at updater. Who said MM didn't care about Studio/Homesite users?

Well boo hiss: the recent revision of the Macromedia site in March 2003 has caused the URL for the HS+ updater to be invalid so you're taken to the front page of the MM site. Try this instead: http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/resourcecenter/rc_driver.cfm?pageName=hsp%5Fupdater. And it's behind a registration/login page. Oh well. Once you're past that, you can indeed get the updater. And the DWMX updater link above is still good.

One thing the updater doesn't fix is that HomeSite+ does NOT by default include the CF docs. See my entry on 10/4 about downloading that addition.

Oh, and if you don't know about HomeSite+, it's basically a merging of HomeSite 5 and CF Studio 5 which is available FREE on your Dreamweaver MX or Studio MX CD. Many don't know it's available because it's not on the install menu of those CDs. Just browse them to find this available, and you can have both DWMX and HS+ together on the same system, using each at your preference. (See my other entries here for more info on HomeSite+, as well as things others on speeding up DWMX and more. Use the search option at left to search for DreamWeaver.)

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

News is traveling fast and furious on some lists about a new announcement of CFMX for J2EE now available to run atop JRun on Mac OS X, at least in a developer (not production) edition. The bottom line is you need to:

Macromedia today announced Macromedia JRun 4 for Mac OS X, the first
commercial J2EE compatible application server to support Mac OS X. JRun
can deploy and manage standards-based Java applications, offering
features for accelerated deployment and scalability along with full Java
2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) compatibility. A developer version of JRun 4
is available for free online, while commercial versions are $900 per
processor.

I'll add that if in the future MM comes out with CFMX for J2EE to run on other servers, as has been discussed, then when it comes out to run on Tomcat, which is bundled with OS X (I hear), then you won't even need the JRun middleman. No news yet on when that might happen, but it's been discussed publicly as a future plan.

If you'd like to get a preview (and offer any feedback) on my planned February CFDJ article, "Fun with Filters in CFMX", check it out at http://www.systemanage.com/previews/. I'll need any feedback in the next couple of days, and will have to pull it soon after that, but until then enjoy.